Oscar van Vlijmen wrote:
From: Andy McDonald Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 14:16:59 -0400 Subject: Re: zone.tab corrections
In the case that Russian is one of the official languages, I would agree that no change is required. However this is distinct from the status of Russian as being widely understood; certainly many people in the former USSR understand Russian, but I would imagine that the average Ukrainian, Moldovan, Tajik or Georgian would take issue with a transliteration from Russian.
Note that I am a bit lazy (I did most of the Russian names for TZ). Lists with time zones in Russia and the former Soviet Republics can be found in Russian. Finding the local names means a lot more work. The GeoNames server is a great help though. But the transliteration of names is not always correct. Best would be: find the name in the original spelling with Cyrillic, Arabic, whatever characters, find the official or a reliable transliteration scheme and produce a posix 1 conformant transliteration. There you see: too much work for me!
The time zones of the former USSR, plus Mongolia (heavily influenced by its neighbour) are: AM +4011+04430 Asia/Yerevan AZ +4023+04951 Asia/Baku BY +5354+02734 Europe/Minsk EE +5925+02445 Europe/Tallinn GE +4143+04449 Asia/Tbilisi KZ +4315+07657 Asia/Almaty most locations KZ +4448+06528 Asia/Qyzylorda Qyzylorda (Kyzylorda, Kzyl-Orda) KZ +5017+05710 Asia/Aqtobe Aqtobe (Aktobe) KZ +4431+05016 Asia/Aqtau Atyrau (Atirau, Gur'yev), Mangghystau (Mankistau) KZ +5113+05121 Asia/Oral West Kazakhstan KG +4254+07436 Asia/Bishkek LV +5657+02406 Europe/Riga LT +5441+02519 Europe/Vilnius MD +4700+02850 Europe/Chisinau MN +4755+10653 Asia/Ulaanbaatar most locations MN +4801+09139 Asia/Hovd Bayan-Olgiy, Govi-Altai, Hovd, Uvs, Zavkhan MN +4804+11430 Asia/Choibalsan Dornod, Sukhbaatar RU +5443+02030 Europe/Kaliningrad Moscow-01 - Kaliningrad RU +5545+03735 Europe/Moscow Moscow+00 - west Russia RU +4844+04425 Europe/Volgograd Moscow+00 - Caspian Sea RU +5312+05009 Europe/Samara Moscow+01 - Samara, Udmurtia RU +5651+06036 Asia/Yekaterinburg Moscow+02 - Urals RU +5500+07324 Asia/Omsk Moscow+03 - west Siberia RU +5502+08255 Asia/Novosibirsk Moscow+03 - Novosibirsk RU +5601+09250 Asia/Krasnoyarsk Moscow+04 - Yenisei River RU +5216+10420 Asia/Irkutsk Moscow+05 - Lake Baikal RU +6200+12940 Asia/Yakutsk Moscow+06 - Lena River RU +4310+13156 Asia/Vladivostok Moscow+07 - Amur River RU +4658+14242 Asia/Sakhalin Moscow+07 - Sakhalin Island RU +5934+15048 Asia/Magadan Moscow+08 - Magadan RU +5301+15839 Asia/Kamchatka Moscow+09 - Kamchatka RU +6445+17729 Asia/Anadyr Moscow+10 - Bering Sea TJ +3835+06848 Asia/Dushanbe TM +3757+05823 Asia/Ashgabat UA +5026+03031 Europe/Kiev most locations UA +4837+02218 Europe/Uzhgorod Ruthenia UA +4750+03510 Europe/Zaporozhye Zaporozh'ye, E Lugansk UA +4457+03406 Europe/Simferopol central Crimea UZ +3940+06648 Asia/Samarkand west Uzbekistan UZ +4120+06918 Asia/Tashkent east Uzbekistan Most of these time zones are named from the accepted English spelling, or - for Russia - accepted transliteration from Russian, so there are few transliteration issues. In addition to the issue of Ukrainian names, the only difficulty arises - to the best of my knowledge - with Hovd (often transliterated from Ховд as Khovd (but as Paul Eggert says in the 'asia' file, 'Naming and spelling is tricky in Mongolia'). I was not confident in the Kazakh names, but the CIA seems to agree: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kz.html . In short, I think that the time zones of the former USSR are appropriately named, with the exception (I claim!) of those in Ukraine.